Clew hit a key and the message blinked off. In it’s place were the notes on Elizabeth Stride, including that one photo that he’d found. He paused to take another close look at it. He enlarged it so that it filled the screen.
A remarkable woman. Now he wished that he had known her. He had a hunch that she would have been just as remarkable if she’d lived a more conventional life. A top athlete, perhaps. She seemed to have that kind of body. Her tenacity, her resiliency, would have served her well in just about anything she tried. And she would have found a man who was good enough for her. Not a wild man like Kessler. Someone steady.
Okay, he thought. Say it. You mean someone like you?
Yeah, well, maybe. Who knows? And even later, after all the hurt and the damage, someone like him could have helped to heal. He’d have protected her. Been proud of her. He’d bet he could have saved her.
He heard Alex ask, “Who’s the babe? Do you know her?”
Clew muttered a curse. He felt a blush on his cheeks. He quickly shut off the machine. Alex mistook his reaction for anger. Alex said, “I’m not peeking. I couldn’t help seeing.” He was standing well back from the screen.
Clew said, “She’s no one special.” He gathered his things.
He’d been caught indulging himself in a fantasy. He could have handled her?
He could have saved her? What next; he’d become the only love of her life? Domestic bliss forever more? Get real.
Even so, thought Clew, he wished that he’d known her. He really wished that he could have known her.
SEVEN
On the evening before Clew saw Bannerman’s message, a small dinner party had taken place on an island off the Carolina coast.
The hostess of that party had been running late. Her three guests were due to arrive very shortly and she still hadn’t showered and changed. The meal that she’d prepared was almost ready, however. All that remained was to light her gas grill. After that, she could be dressed in twenty minutes.
She’d stepped onto her patio to fire the grill when she heard police sirens in the distance. She paused to listen, as most people would, to determine where the sirens seemed to be headed and to wonder what might have happened. She then went about her task, as most people would. She had felt no sense of alarm.
That in itself was remarkable, she supposed. It was not so long ago that the sound of sirens would have triggered a less passive response. She would have gone to the closet where she kept her blue duffel. It was always packed and ready, well hidden. It held cash and weapons, and two changes of clothing plus the loose-fitting black she used for night work. It contained two wigs and two sets of contact lenses, one set tinted dark brown, the other blue. It contained two sets of false documents as well and about a million dollars worth of diamonds.
Within seconds she would have been out of her house. She would have been walking, not running, toward a spot she’d selected from which she could watch unobserved. If the sirens passed her by, nothing lost; she’d go back home. If they’d converged on her address, she would simply have simply vanished, never to be able to return.
But on Hilton Head Island where she’d made her new life, and especially in Sea Pines, her gated community, all that a siren usually meant was that some older resident had fallen ill and that someone had called 911. There was crime on the island, but not much and mostly petty. Almost none of it took place within the gated communities. They were wealthy, therefore tempting, but not worth the risk. Most had only one exit, easily blocked, and all were well guarded and patrolled.
True, there was that episode two years ago when the bounty hunters came to the island. To her surprise, however, they had not come for her. They had come for two people who were strangers to her then. A young girl and her guardian, both Muslims. It was Martin who’d spotted three bounty hunters. He recognized the Englishman who led them. It was the Englishman’s turn to be surprised when he saw the Black Angel standing over him that night. Martin fed what was left of him to the crabs.
She had hoped that was the end of it. It was wishful thinking. Those who sent them sent others, three Algerians this time. The Algerians came by boat, across the Atlantic, to do what the bounty hunters had failed to do. But this time they came not to kidnap, but to kill. The Algerians were fanatics, out of control. Their intention was to kill on the grandest scale possible. They brought with them the warhead of a nuclear device. They did not have the means to detonate the device, but they did have the means to release its radiation by exposing its plutonium core. It was a very near thing. They had almost succeeded. They would have turned this island into a desert for a thousand years into the future.
The federal authorities had gone to great lengths to keep this event from the public. No one knew what sort of device they had brought or how easily they had reached these shores with it. The actual damage to the island was minimal. A few yachtsmen whose boats were near that of the Algerians did suffer from radiation poisoning. They were told that they had scarlet fever, an isolated outbreak; they were whisked away for treatment. And thousands of others never knew how close they came. They never knew that Martin Kessler had stopped the Algerians. They never knew that he gave his life for them.
The authorities had decided to keep their names out of it. Especially her own. It might invite more attacks. The man who saved this island could not have been Martin Kessler because Martin Kessler had been dead for some time. The authorities had contrived a romantic fiction that he, the year before, had put a gun to his head because he could no longer live without her. And if she, Elizabeth, had pre-deceased Martin, she could not have been part of this either. The problem there, however, was
that she was in fact here. Her name was in the phone book. E, period, Stride. Her last name was even on her mailbox.
“Very dumb, Elizabeth,” Martin said more than once. “God forbid that those who hunt you should be inconvenienced. This way they can send you a bomb through the mail and save a fortune in travel expenses.”
He would not have understood. She wanted to be real again. She wanted to live like everyone else and to try to find the person she’d been before all the hatred and the killing. But, of course, he was right. That was pushing it. That was dumb.
The authorities solved that problem through a simple device. They created a file on the Elizabeth Stride whose name was in the Hilton Head phonebook. The photo in that file was of her next door neighbor, a woman almost eighty years old. That file
showed that she was a widow who’d moved here from Warren, Ohio. Clearly not the Black Angel. Look elsewhere, not here. There was no Martin Kessler here either.
She lit the gas grill. She felt her eyes growing moist. She muttered to herself, “Damn you, Martin.”
He hadn’t died to save all these people. That was a romantic fiction as well.
He died because to him, this was just one more adventure. He died because it probably never occurred to him that one day his lunatic luck might run out. He died because he didn’t have the sense that God gave him. He should never have come to this island.
She’d told him not to come. She’d told him not to try to find her. She’d told him, “No, Martin. I don’t love you. I don’t.”
She’d told him, “What’s more, you bring nothing but trouble. If it doesn’t find you, you find it, and I’m tired. I’m tired of living with a price on my head. You’re as hunted as I am, but with you it’s a game. You don’t avoid them; you entice them. You revel in outwitting them. And when we’ve outdistanced them, at least for a while, you’ll get bored and go looking for some dive of a saloon that has two or three Harleys parked out front. You with your damned Swisher Sweets.”
She’d told him, “I’ve had it. I want a life, Martin. I want to have friends. Normal people. Women friends.”
She’d said, “I want to do the things that normal people do. I want to go shopping, play tennis, have a garden. I want, for a change, to walk into a restaurant, not having to check out the exits in advance and not h
aving to scan every face in the room.”
She’d said, “I don’t love you. You don’t love me either. What we are is a habit and a bad one at that.”
She’d said all these things to him. And other things just as hurtful. She’d thought that most of them were true when she said them.
Did she love him? Well, yes. But she didn’t know it then. Was she grateful to him? Sure. He’d saved her life more than once. He’d stayed at her bedside for almost six months after she had been shot in Romania. And later, much later, he’d gone back to Chamonix and spread the word that she’d died in the States. She should have thanked him for that. She never did. Instead, she got angry when he turned up again. “Just checking,” he said. “Just to see you’re all right.”
But by that time, she was seeing a man with whom she could take quiet walks on the beach. And go to the movies, go to dinner, go dancing. He was a nice man, a doctor; she liked being with him. Except for her reluctance to let him see her naked, she might very well have had a sex life again. But he’d have known bullet scars when he saw them.
In the end, though, she was grateful that Martin had come. She was grateful, above all, that he’d saved the life of the girl who had become like a daughter to her. Young Aisha was the one the bounty hunters wanted most. Aisha was the heir to considerable property in and around Cairo, Egypt. She had an uncle who was desperate to gain control of that property because it was worth many millions to him. The uncle, and the people with whom he did business, were willing to kill anyone who stood in their way. But under Egypt’s law, it couldn’t be touched unless Aisha could be found and brought back to Cairo where her uncle would become her legal guardian. Or unless it could be proven that she’s dead.
The bounty hunters found her, they took her, they hid her, until they could arrange to have her flown out. It was Martin who found them. She and Martin got her
back. The bounty hunters died where they stood. Then her uncle’s associates sent
in the Algerians with instructions to kill her and be done with it. Instead, every one of them died on this island or in the waters around it. Even the uncle and the uncle’s associates. They all died. Martin died with them.
Aisha was fourteen years old when this happened. Very brave, but still very young. She’d been living here, in hiding, sent here with false papers by her parents who had reason to fear for her life. They saved Aisha, but they could not save themselves. Both her parents were soon to be murdered.
How well she had accepted that terrible loss. Aisha’s strong Muslim faith had
sustained her. It was a faith that Elizabeth had at one time despised and, later, a faith she almost wished that she shared when she saw how it had comforted Aisha. It was Aisha, in fact, who had comforted her in the weeks after Martin Kessler died.
Damn him.
Damn you, Martin.
Tears ran down her cheeks.
But she dried them and forced herself to shake off the memory. She did not want to think about this anymore. She did not want to think about Martin. She went into her bathroom and turned on the shower, stripping out of her clothing as it ran. She avoided looking at herself in the mirror. She did not want to see her scars either. She stepped under the spray and lathered herself thoroughly before rinsing hot and then cold. Cold showers were a habit. She thought they heightened her senses. And, not least, they seemed to tighten her skin.
She patted herself dry and returned to her bedroom where she’d laid out the dress and the shoes she had chosen. The dress was oriental, full length, a soft yellow, with an embroidered ivy vine at one shoulder. Very soft, very cool, very feminine, she thought. She had just the right bracelets to go with it.
She still heard the sirens. Perhaps more than before. And they did seem to sound more urgent than usual. She could hear the whooping sounds that police cruisers make when they want other vehicles to get out of their way. And now the harsh bleat of a fire truck. They were nevertheless headed in the opposite direction. They grew farther and farther away.
Her three dinner guests were now a few minutes late. They were probably held up by that activity. Just as well. She could use the time to touch up her hair and to do a final check in the kitchen. She’d set a table for four on her screened-in porch that looked out on a tidal lagoon. She saw that there were just enough clouds in the sky to promise a colorful sunset. She had prepared a nice salad of fresh fruit, mostly citrus. The main course, from the grill, would be a butterflied lamb that had been marinating most of the day. Dessert would be a blueberry cobbler that she’d made. She’d never tried one before and she’d burned it just a bit, but a sprinkling of brown sugar would hide the charred edges. In any case, the sun would have set by that time. They’d be eating it by candlelight. Perhaps no one would notice.
She had chosen a wine, a nice Chardonnay, even though her guests would probably decline it in favor of iced tea or Pepsi. All three were Muslims, but not equally devout. There was Jasmine who’d converted to Islam while in prison, but had yet to fully embrace those teachings that related to dietary laws. Jasmine, or Jazz as she was generally better known, saw little harm in an occasional Jack Daniels and even less harm in a pork chop.
Elizabeth had never asked why she’d been in prison. But she knew that Jasmine, who was black and had grown up in Brooklyn, had once been a drug addict and probably a dealer and possibly a prostitute as well. Not that it mattered. Nor did her real name. The person she’d been before she became Jasmine was a person who no longer existed.
Well, perhaps not entirely. She had not lost her street smarts; the hard edge was still there. She could still, in her thirties, have done well as a hooker. Good body, chiseled features and a big easy laugh. She would still have no trouble stopping traffic.
Nadia Halaby, the second of her guests, had been a Muslim from birth.
She was born in Algeria to a well-to-do family, but educated in France. Nadia was a graduate of the Sorbonne and still kept an apartment in Paris. She’d grown up playing tennis, stayed with it through school, and eventually won several amateur titles before briefly turning professional. She was now an instructor at a tennis academy where talented young hopefuls came to train.
Nadia, however, was much more than that. And her tennis academy was much more than that. While in France, she had set up a safe house of sorts for Muslim women who had fled from the homelands. That first one was attacked and under constant threat. Nadia fled to this country, flew those women here with her, and set up a much larger one on this island. These were women who had fled the oppression of their sex in their various Islamic homelands. Some wanted education that had been denied them. Some ran from marriages that had been arranged for them. A few had talents, artistic or otherwise, that they had been forbidden to pursue. They were, in the eyes of those Algerian terrorists, no better than whores and already lost to God. Such women, if found, were to be stoned or burned and so should those who’d given them shelter.
Young Aisha was no runaway. Aisha’s mother had known Nadia and was one of her supporters. When it became clear that Aisha’s life was in danger, Aisha’s mother knew where to send her because she knew that Nadia would protect her with her life. But the bounty hunters tracked her and, later, the fanatics. When the Algerians realized that it wasn’t just Aisha, when they were told that all those runaways were living here as well, not to mention the notorious Nadia Halaby, it seemed that Allah himself must have led them to this island. The Koran, according to their reading of that book, enjoined the faithful to “make wide slaughter in defeating the enemies of God.” Those words are in there, but they refer to invaders. Foreign armies, for example. Not women. And not children.
Elizabeth, again, tried to push this from her mind. This was not a time to indulge in old sorrows. This was a bright and lovely occasion. Aisha had turned sweet sixteen. Elizabeth dearly wished that her parents could have lived to see the splendid young lady that their daughter had become. But they would not have been surprised. They had raised her after all. An
d, according to Aisha, they were still around anyway, so make that five guests instead of three.
Nadia says that Aisha is the image of her mother and she says that Aisha’s mother was stunning. The same enormous dark eyes, the same raven’s wing hair except that Aisha wore a much shorter cut now. The same skin coloring under her tan; it was somewhere between olive and gold. The same ultra-wide smile, the same perfect complexion and, according to Nadia, the same heart.
Aisha’s only fault, thought Elizabeth, was her tennis game. She was getting frustratingly good. They played a few sets of singles at least once a week, but Elizabeth hadn’t beaten her in months. Not legitimately, anyway. Sometimes Aisha would have the final set in her pocket and she’d suddenly start double faulting and such to let Elizabeth back in the match. And of course she denied that she was just being kind, but she does that with other opponents as well. No killer instinct. She should work on that. Save the kindness for after the match.
Perhaps the new racquet she’d bought Aisha for her birthday would encourage her to go for the jugular more often. It had a good name for it. The Wilson Sledge Hammer. She’d seen Aisha admiring it in the pro shop.
Suddenly, Elizabeth felt an unwelcome chill. What if Aisha and Nadia and Jasmine were late because they were the cause of those sirens? Someone after them again? No, don’t even think it. Those sirens had seemed headed more toward the main gate than toward the tennis academy. Even so, Elizabeth stepped out onto her driveway. She waited and worried for another ten minutes until at last she saw Nadia’s car coming.
“I’m sorry, Elizabeth,” Nadia told her. “We couldn’t resist going to see what was happening. I guess we’re still sensitized to sirens.”
As Nadia spoke, she had opened her trunk and was gathering wrapped birthday presents. She was handing some to Jasmine who was wearing a dress.
Bannerman's Ghosts Page 8